This guide is for coaches — head coaches, assistant coaches, and anyone responsible for athlete development. CrewLAB gives coaches a single platform for everything — training, communication, video, attendance, and athlete development. This guide covers how to set up your team, manage your roster, and use CrewLAB’s coaching tools every day.
Creating your team
Your first team is created as part of onboarding. To create another team later, click your team name in CrewLAB, then select “Add a Team.” Give it a name, select your sport, and add a brief description.
If you’re joining an existing team instead, you can do so through an invite link or a team code.
Roster management
Inviting athletes
The first thing you’ll do is get your athletes onto the team. CrewLAB gives you a shareable invite link or team code — send it via text, email, or post it in your existing group chat. Athletes, parents, and others tap the link (or enter the code), create an account (or sign in), and they’re on your roster.
Squads and groupings
Squads let you schedule workouts specific to a sub-group — for example, distance runners and sprinters often need different workouts on the same day.
Create squads from the Squads tab. Then, when scheduling a workout on the Calendar, you can invite the squads you’ve created instead of the whole team. Squads can be edited at any time as your team evolves through the season.
Squads can also compete against each other on the Leaderboard.
Roles and permissions
CrewLAB has two independent sets of roles: club-level roles (Admin, Member) and team-level roles (Coach, Captain, Athlete, Parent, Other). See the Roles guide for the full breakdown of what each role can do.
Coaching tools for daily use
Once your team is set up, here’s how CrewLAB’s coaching tools for team management fit into your daily routine:
Calendar and training plan
Use the team calendar to schedule practices, events, competitions, and rest days. Attach workouts to calendar events so athletes know what’s coming before they arrive. Push notifications go out when you add or change events, so the team stays informed.
Build your training plan week by week or map out the whole season. Athletes see only the events and workouts you publish — you can draft future sessions and publish them when you’re ready.
Messaging and chat channels
CrewLAB’s messaging replaces GroupMe, email chains, and text threads. You can create multiple channels for different purposes:
- Team-wide — announcements, schedule changes, logistics
- Squad-specific — targeted communication for sub-groups
- Coaches-only — private channel for coaching staff coordination
- Social — optional, for team culture and off-topic conversation
As the coach, you control which channels exist, who has access, and what the communication norms are. All messaging is SafeSport and MAAPP compliant with built-in moderation tools.
Video
Capture video during practice or competition, then upload it to CrewLAB. Tag individual athletes so they can find clips of themselves.
Attendance and RSVPs
When athletes RSVP to calendar events, CrewLAB tracks attendance automatically. Over time, you’ll see patterns — who’s consistently showing up, who’s dropping off, and where gaps might indicate burnout or disengagement.
Review attendance data from the Analytics tab.
Workout tracking and analytics
Athletes log workouts manually or sync automatically from connected wearables. You’ll see training data across your whole roster — volume, intensity, duration, and sport-specific metrics like stroke rate or pace.
The Analytics tab gives you a bird’s-eye view of team trends. Daily Check-In data (mood, sleep, stress) combined with training load gives you an early warning system for overtraining, burnout, or disengagement. As the coach, you see check-in and analytics data for your whole roster; Captains and Athletes only see their own. Use this data to make smarter coaching decisions — not just harder training plans.
Load Management: CrewLAB calculates Fitness (training load) and Fatigue (training stress) to produce a Readiness score. This helps you plan training that maximizes performance while minimizing injury risk. See the Analytics help topic for details.
Growing beyond coaching tools
When your club is ready to add payments, registration, or waivers, that’s handled at the Club level, above your team. Your team stays exactly as it is — the club simply adds a business layer on top. To set up a club, book a time with our team.
If you’re also the admin, see the Admin Guide to set up the club layer.